Recalling Mama

Recalling Mama

Last weekend Will and I trekked out to State College PA, where we spent summers in football camp as kids, to visit our favorite aunt and uncle, Bruce and Susan.  Susan is my Dad’s cousin, the daughter Louis, the child of Ora Hewitt and Kirk Shepard parents of Kirk, Carl, Louis, and Winston. When we arrived, Susan was busy organizing material from her sister Trish’s collection. Dad loved Trish, presiding over her marriage to her girlfriend. All weekend, we told family stories of a sculley maid and a deserter from Hesse, who formed the family  a long time ago, looking a pictures of the Shepard Fertilizer company in South Georgia, near Thomasville, a long lost picture of Mama Hewitt in college in Bastrop, Tx, and her husband Kirk and her brothers. We tried to recall their tours abroad during WWII, Bruce sharing stories of his tour in Vietnan, tips on surviving a bar fight, lots and lots of stories of football, and grit, and debates about income inequality, and approaches to education for the people and a great dinner at Gigi's, some gumbo and grits, a morning cold bath and sauna and chill out in a hyperbaric chamber.  There are always stories to recall and make sense of, between Ora’s four sons, a fifth who died as a small baby, who she grieved her entire.  Three of her son’s ended up at Harvard, the forth, Louis West Point, like Bruce. And Louis outlived all of them. Kirk, Louis and Carl served during WWII.  Winston stayed home on the farm, one man home, during those years. Dad adored Winston. My brother named him son after him. Kirl came home from the war nuts, ready to terrorize his kids, and Bruce when he came to visit the old house in Thomasville. Carl is the biggest mystery of the crew.  Before I was born, he fell (or was pushed) down the stairs by another man, presumably his partner. Dad always chuckled it was an  S and M accident gone wrong. But no onr really knows.

The mysteries of these guys were many. That didn’t stop with Carl. Will and I played football with Coach Sandusky, the infamous coach at Penn State, who was later convicted of sexual abusew of his players. He was also an associate of Coach, Foglietta, the Poly Prep football coach who followed a similar path of Sandusky. “Poly Prep's treatment of Foglietta and his victims suggests an agonizing template for how abuse can proliferate unchecked over a long period of time.”.The toxic masculinities and injuries are many. But we’re getting away from the story. 

I met Mama only a few times in the late 1970’s, when she was in her late 90’s. But I didn’t get to talk with her much, just seeing how kind she was to us, giving grandad cash to take us to the store to buy ourselves something. I know she went to school in Bastrop Texas, just Southeaast  of Austin.  And taught my Dad to read, cajoling him with a love of Greek mythology, she would read to him, helping him to learn a bit of what was being said, enough to elicit curiosity for Dad to want to read it himself. Soon enough she was editing Dad’s essays about the myths, he was reading himself, beginning a lifetime love of reading Dad would carry until his last days.  He always smiled when he told me stories about her. If there is any one person who made us who we were are, it was her, the young woman who found her way into college in Bastrop Texas, before settling into a life in Thomasville Ga, a town with red dirt roads, where he she would make a life with my great grandfather Kirk. 

She left the her grandkids a mimeograph of her recollections of growing up in reconstruction south, the poverty that was everywhere, the soldiers who came home from the war, the freed slaves, everyone desperate for food, the omnipresent hunger, her desire for education, finding it where she could get it, inspiring it in those around her.

A copy of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From arrived in the mail, a gift from Rob. “The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried,” writes Didion.  I can’t stop thinking of Mama reading Didion, who wrote about growing up in the West. Mama wrote about the South, trying to find meaning in a family and a yearning for books, coping with civil wars, world wars, cold wars, and a family trying to do its best, coping with their wounds as best as they could, while passing both an ambition and injuries down generation after generation. 

Will and I stood for a photo with Great Grandfather Kirk, the father of the grandfather we knew in Thomasville, on our way out of town. Susan gave us a copy of his son’s wife, Harriet Heim's old bible, before we made out way back to New York.